The Marriage Clause

“Nope. Dinner locale courtesy of Google Maps. It was the closest to the hostel and had a good Yelp review. I figure we had nothing to lose, seeing as we were already taking our lives for granted by staying in the murder motel for the night, but, hey, life is for the living, right?” He lifted his bottle in salute and tipped it back. “Plus, it reminds me of a few pubs me and my buddies frequented in Scotland. Good times, except for the time I was persuaded to eat haggis on a drunken dare.”

I dragged my gaze away from the spectacle of those sensual lips wrapping around the bottle top and focused on my own drink. I didn’t care for Guinness, but it seemed sacrilegious to order anything less in an Irish pub. Besides, the beer helped loosen the tension cording my shoulders, so I continued to slug it down. “How’d that end?” I asked.

“With my head stuck in a dirty toilet and a bunch of locals laughing their asses off,” he answered wryly. “Never touched haggis again.”

I bit back a laugh, but I rather liked the image of a young Luca puking his guts out in a foreign country.

“You like that, huh?” His slow grin did terrible things to my stomach. “Then you’ll love the story of how I woke up after a wild night in London to find my face a different color than when I passed out. The fuckers sprayed me with the darkest sunless tanner they could find. I went to bed white and woke up a mottled dark brown, and that shit did not scrub off easily. I spent the rest of the week looking like I’d caught a skin disease until it wore off.”

At that I really did laugh. “Was this during your European pub crawl after high school?”

“The very same. How’d you know? You were pretty young then.”

“I always knew what was going on. My circumstances weren’t exactly normal.”

He conceded my point with a silent nod, but before either of us could say much more, our food arrived and we both let it go, choosing dinner over uncomfortable topics.

And I was grateful. I didn’t want to have a deep, soulful conversation with Luca about anything, much less my unorthodox childhood, thanks to his family, and he’d seemed on the verge of saying something distressingly nice or even apologetic.

I couldn’t risk buying into anything he had to say, even if a part of me craved it more than I wanted to admit.

I’d long since stopped wondering how things might’ve been different if Luca had apologized in the slightest for breaking my heart... I wondered if I would’ve granted my forgiveness. I knew the answer—of course I would’ve. I’d been helplessly in love with the jackass. I was pretty sure stars had twinkled in my eyes like a cartoon character whenever he’d been around.

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